USING REINFORCEMENT-BASED METHODS TO ENHANCE MEMBERSHIP RECRUITMENT IN A VOLUNTEER ORGANIZATION

The present study employed reinforcement-based methods to induce existing members to recruit new members to join a chamber of commerce. Three interventions took place during June and July of 3 successive years. The investigators trained chamber leaders to use reinforcement methods (e.g., contingent tokens) to reinforce recruitment and dues collections. All three interventions produced substantial increases in their targets.     

Scaling clinical judgments of symptom pathology by means of the psychophysiological method of magnitude estimation

Summing scores across heterogeneous symptom items without consideration of their differing psychopathological significance has been criticized as producing an inadequate picture of an individual's clinical status. The purpose of this study was to derive symptom item weights representing clinically judged seriousness of each symptom through the application of Stevens's psychophysical method of magnitude estimation. A nationwide sample of 129 clinicians rated the pathological significance of 221 symptom items in a design such that every rater rated 121 items, 21 of which were rated by all raters and 100 of which were rated only by the A or B subgroup to which each rater was randomly assigned. Each item was rated as to the seriousness of the pathology it would represent if manifested by either a boy child, girl child, boy adolescent, or girl adolescent, with one-fourth of the raters assigned to each condition. The results of 211 two-way analyses of variance revealed that age and age and sex in interaction, but not sex alone, significantly influenced the clinical ratings. The resulting magnitude estimation ratings of symptom pathology ranged from 1.0 to 9.9. They were demonstrated to have satisfactory reliability and convergent validity and to have the psychophysical characteristics of a prothetic continuum.A preliminary version of this paper was presented at the 85th Annual Convention of the American Psychological Association, San Francisco, August 1977. The research was supported by HEW grant MH24886. The authors wish to express appreciation to Walter W. Wengel for his work in developing the median quotient ratings used in the study, to Terrance Auger for making available unpublished raw data, and to Merton S. Krause for helpful suggestions regarding the interpretation of results.     

Psychopathy and fear: Specific impairments in judging behaviors that frighten others

Psychopathy is a disorder associated with antisocial behavior and deficits in responding to emotional stimuli, particularly fear-related stimuli. This research demonstrates that these deficits extend to judgments about behaviors that cause fear in others. We assessed whether psychopathy is associated with the ability to identify the emotional consequences of social behaviors and with judgments about these behaviors' acceptability. We found that psychopathy, as indexed by the Psychopathic Personality Inventory, is associated with impairments in identifying behaviors that cause fear and in judging the moral acceptability of these behaviors. Ratings of emotional consequences and moral acceptability were also correlated, such that individuals who less accurately identified behaviors that cause fear also judged these behaviors to be more morally acceptable. Psychopathy scores mediated the relationship between these two variables. These findings suggest that understanding that frightening others is unacceptable relies on understanding this type of behavior's emotional consequences, and have significance for understanding the relationship between psychopathy, empathy, and antisocial behavior. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved).     

An Examination of Network Position and Childhood Relational Aggression: Integrating Resource Control and Social Exchange Theories

Applying resource control theory and social exchange theory, we examined the social network conditions under which elementary age children were likely to engage in relational aggression. Data on classroom peer networks and peer‐nominated behaviors were collected on 671 second‐ through fourth‐grade children in 34 urban, low‐income classrooms. Nested regression models with robust cluster standard errors demonstrated that the association between children's number of relationships and their levels of relational aggression was moderated by the number of relationships that their affiliates had. Children with more peer relationships (i.e., higher network centrality) exhibited higher levels of relational aggression, but only when these relationships were with peers who had fewer connections themselves (i.e., poorly connected peers). This finding remained significant even when controlling for common predictors of relational aggression including gender, overt aggression, prosocial behavior, victimization, social preference, and perceived popularity. Results are discussed in terms of their implications for advancing the literature on childhood relational aggression and their practical applications for identifying children at risk for these behaviors.     

Psychometric properties of the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory-Adolescent (MMPI-A) Clinical, Content, and Supplementary scales in a forensic sample

In this study, we evaluated the internal psychometric properties and external correlates of scores on the Clinical, Content, and Supplementary scales in a forensic sample of 496 adolescents (315 boys and 181 girls) who were court-ordered to receive psychological evaluations. We examined Cronbach's alpha coefficients, scale intercorrelation matrices, and frequencies of scale elevations. Further, we found varying degrees of support for the convergent and discriminant validity of scores on the MMPI-A (Butcher et al., 1992 ) Clinical, Content, and Supplementary scales. This study adds to the body of literature establishing the utility of the MMPI-A in forensic evaluations.     

Integrating advice and experience: learning and decision making with social and nonsocial cues

When making decisions, people typically gather information from both social and nonsocial sources, such as advice from others and direct experience. This research adapted a cognitive learning paradigm to examine the process by which people learn what sources of information are credible. When participants relied on advice alone to make decisions, their learning of source reliability proceeded in a manner analogous to traditional cue learning processes and replicated the established learning phenomena. However, when advice and nonsocial cues were encountered together as an established phenomenon, blocking (ignoring redundant information) did not occur. Our results suggest that extant cognitive learning models can accommodate either advice or nonsocial cues in isolation. However, the combination of advice and nonsocial cues (a context more typically encountered in daily life) leads to different patterns of learning, in which mutually supportive information from different types of sources is not regarded as redundant and may be particularly compelling. For these situations, cognitive learning models still constitute a promising explanatory tool but one that must be expanded. As such, these findings have important implications for social psychological theory and for cognitive models of learning.     

Are historic years understood as numbers or events? An fMRI study of numbers with semantic associations

While numbers generally cue processing of quantity or order, they can also contain semantic information, as in the case of historic years (e.g., “1492” calls forth associations of Columbus sailing the ocean blue). Whether these dates are processed as quantities or events may depend on the context in which they occur. We examined such “ambiguous number” processing in two different contexts using a paired-comparison task, recording both behavioral responses and brain activity. Participants were either asked to think of all items as numbers and to choose the larger number, or were told to treat the comparators as events and to choose the later event. Behaviorally, all events showed a normal distance effect, establishing that they may be understood and compared in an ordinal sequence. Functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) demonstrated significant differences between years when treated as numbers versus as events. Dates in both contexts shared activity in parietal lobe regions previously implicated in number processing. Dates as numbers showed no extra-numeric activity, while dates thought of as events evoked activity in temporal semantic processing and frontal semantic retrieval areas. These differences suggest that extra-numeric information may be easily accessed and incorporated during processing when supported by even a weak context. This work supports previous studies showing a dissociation between quantity and meaning, and illustrates the brain areas involved in these different aspects.     

Infant behaviors influence mothers’ provision of responsive and directive behaviors

Mother–infant interactions are important to infant development because they are predictive of infants’ social, cognitive, and language development (0070 and 0150). Because maternal responsive and directive behaviors are associated with differential infant outcomes, it is important to investigate influences on mothers’ provision of responsive and directive behaviors. Yet, the dyadic interaction literature is predominantly unidirectional from maternal behavior to infant outcomes. Therefore, the current study examined infant initiating behaviors and consequent maternal responses in a sample of 26 13-month-old infants and their mothers, videotaped during 5 min of free-play. Findings revealed that infants produced a variety of initiatives, and that these different infant initiatives prompted differential patterns of maternal responsive versus directive behaviors. Further, results of analyses of divergent types of maternal directive behaviors – Responsive Directives, ReDirectives, and Intrusive Directives – also may help clarify major discrepancies in the current literature regarding the positive and negative effects of maternal directiveness.     

Community structure analysis of rejection sensitive personality profiles: A common neural response to social evaluative threat?

Monitoring social threat is essential for maintaining healthy social relationships, and recent studies suggest a neural alarm system that governs our response to social rejection. Frontal-midline theta (4–8 Hz) oscillatory power might act as a neural correlate of this system by being sensitive to unexpected social rejection. Here, we examined whether frontal-midline theta is modulated by individual differences in personality constructs sensitive to social disconnection. In addition, we examined the sensitivity of feedback-related brain potentials (i.e., the feedback-related negativity and P3) to social feedback. Sixty-five undergraduate female participants (mean age = 19.69 years) participated in the Social Judgment Paradigm, a fictitious peer-evaluation task in which participants provided expectancies about being liked/disliked by peer strangers. Thereafter, they received feedback signaling social acceptance/rejection. A community structure analysis was employed to delineate personality profiles in our data. Results provided evidence of two subgroups: one group scored high on attachment-related anxiety and fear of negative evaluation, whereas the other group scored high on attachment-related avoidance and low on fear of negative evaluation. In both groups, unexpected rejection feedback yielded a significant increase in theta power. The feedback-related negativity was sensitive to unexpected feedback, regardless of valence, and was largest for unexpected rejection feedback. The feedback-related P3 was significantly enhanced in response to expected social acceptance feedback. Together, these findings confirm the sensitivity of frontal midline theta oscillations to the processing of social threat, and suggest that this alleged neural alarm system behaves similarly in individuals that differ in personality constructs relevant to social evaluation.     

The Impact of Chronic Health Conditions as an Underlying Challenge on Couple’s Wellbeing

Chronic health conditions affect over 100 million Americans (Cano and Leonard in J Clin Psychol 62(11):1409–1418, 2006). Many clinicians are not integrating chronic physical health symptoms into psychotherapy. There is a complexity of issues that arise within the context of chronic health conditions. Making more need for couple and family therapists, whose primary focus is on a systemic family perspective, to understand how chronic health conditions are impacting family systems when they present for therapy (Canavarro and Dattilio in Contemp Fam Ther 33:87–90, 2011; Poleshuck et al. in Prof Psychol 41(4):312–318, 2010). The correlation of chronic health conditions on marriages and relationships has received limited attention in clinical research. This secondary data analysis examines the differences in overall well-being and psychological distress of individuals and couples seeking therapy who report a presence of chronic health conditions. Original research on the relationship between chronic health conditions and well-being, as measured by comparison of means, will be presented. Few studies investigate how chronic health conditions, when not the primary reason for seeking therapy, influence wellbeing and distress upon entering therapy. This study included 2742 participants from a clinical sample of individuals and couple seeking therapy in a family therapy clinic at a university training clinic. Independent t-tests, as well as ANOVA, were run to compare well-being and psychological distress of individuals and couples in the sample. Results showed significant differences in both overall wellbeing and psychological distress for both individuals who reported chronic illness for themselves, or their partners, than those that reported no chronic illness. There were also significant differences between groups on both well-being and psychological distress [F (2, 2706)?=?47.55, p?=?.00, F (2, 2697)?=?54.59, p?=?.00]. This results showed significant differences in well-being when no member of the couple has chronic health conditions, one member, or both members, with both members decreasing wellbeing significantly. This study demonstrates that chronic health conditions impact both the individual diagnosed, their partners, and is especially impactful if both members of a couple are diagnosed with chronic health conditions. Study limitations and clinical implications are also discussed.